Mitchell Hashimoto, one of the founders of HashiCorp and lead developer behind Ghostty, a GPU-accelerated open-source terminal emulator launched in 2023, announced that the app has formally become a non-profit project through fiscal sponsorship by Hack Club, a registered 501©(3) organization.
In Ghostty’s case, Hack Club now manages compliance, donations, accounting, and public financial transparency. Hashimoto says this structure reinforces Ghostty’s commitment to remaining free and open source, provides legal assurances to users and contributors, and establishes a sustainable foundation beyond any single individual’s involvement.
Someone explained to me once why a GPU-accelerated terminal emu might be useful, but I can’t recall what you might use that for. Anyone have an example of what a good use case would be?
It’s just faster and smoother when scrolling text, and all the work of shifting those pixels is pushed off onto specialized hardware that’s much more efficient at it. I use alacritty which is a different GPU-accelerated terminal emulator and I’m very fond of it. It’s not a huge deal, I just figure that if I have the hardware, I might as well use it.
Oh, that makes sense. It also makes more sense why it’s called “Alacritty,” now.
My best guess is some local LLM AI bullshit running in terminal.
That’s a remarkably bad guess.
GPU accelerated terminal emulators first came about in the mid aughts, though the modern ones that are good, the ones like gostty, really first showed up around 2015. the value for them is that rendering text can be a bottleneck in long-running operations on the terminal in a display environment (as opposed to a raw shell). i only know of one shell with ai features, warp, but i avoid proprietary tools that run system breaking actions so i can’t speak to how bullshit is
I guess this is an honest opinion
I switched to Kitty because I felt that the increased speed produced a perceived improvement in my workflow.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29528343
There’s probably no big reason. It’s just that text is printed much faster. There’s no huge gain, especially for general usage and most use cases. But why not? Why shouldn’t you use the gpu if you have one?
If gpu would’ve been first, you’d wonder why you should use cpu if it’s slower. Faster is always(?) better and I as a user don’t really care if it is wayland or x11, why should I care about gpu or cpu? It just sounds great, but under the hood, it’s just a marketing stunt.
It’s nice to have but I just don’t care. Like if earbuds last 6 or 8 hours. They charge within 5 or 10 minutes, why should I care? Or like losless audio. My headphones can’t play it, and more important I can’t hear a difference. It’s nice, I’ll take it, but I don’t care about it.
